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Speaker: Elena Alcalá (I Tatti / Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
Jesuit provincial procurators were elected from each province of the Society´s Assistencies in the world every three to six years to travel to Rome and meet with their superiors in order to address multiple issues. For this reason, Jesuit procurators constitute an understudied “global traveler” of the early modern period. This seminar examines what these trips meant for the Jesuits from the Spanish viceroyalties in America, many of whom had never been to Europe, and what kinds of tasks it involved. Among the latter, they had to recruit missionaries and purchase goods necessary for their work. However, their purchases far surpassed their needs. The talk will focus on how they took advantage of the stops they made on their way to Rome (in Barcelona, Lyon, Milan, Venice, Genoa, and Naples) to acquire paintings, sculptures, relics, medals, textiles, mirrors, clocks, books, prints and more. The documentation is highly specific in describing the materiality of objects as well as provenance. Pointing to geography and materiality, the archive invites thinking anew about the sense of value that these objects carried to their points of reception. What happens to the ideas currently in place about art in the Spanish American viceroyalties when one factors in these shipments and the ways the Jesuits distributed the contents of the crates to their local networks of friends and patrons? To what extent does this international circulation inflect national narratives of art? And is influence the only way to consider the impact of these objects once they reached their final destiny?
Luisa Elena Alcalá is Associate professor in the Department of History and Theory of Art at the Universidad Autónoma (Madrid). Her research focuses on the history of religious images, painting, and the Jesuits in the Spanish American viceroyalties, especially New Spain. She edited Fundaciones jesuíticas en Iberoamérica in 2002 and was co-editor, with Jonathan Brown, of Painting in Latin America, 1550-1820 in 2014. She recently published the monograph La localización de un culto global. La Virgen de Loreto en México (2022) and is currently directing the research project “Agents: Jesuit Procurators and Alternative Channels for Artistic Circulation in the Hispanic World” (www.ProJesArt.org) funded by the Spanish government.
Image: Miguel Cabrera (attribution), The Commemoration of the Meeting of Procurator Juan Francisco López with Pope Benedict XIV, mid.18th century. Museo Soumaya, City of México
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